Zfs

I have a Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Tiny that serves as my starter homelab machine. It’s compact but decently powered with: 2 NICs with 5 ports 1TB SSD 16GB DDR5 RAM I initially installed Proxmox VE (PVE) using ZFS as the file system by selecting RAID0, thinking its features like snapshots and data integrity would be beneficial. However, I soon realized it was a big mistake. ZFS is incredibly RAM-hungry, and with only 16GB of RAM, my homelab couldn’t handle many VMs and services running simultaneously. ...

In this post, I will share my experience with optimizing ZFS on Proxmox, specifically how I reduced memory consumption caused by ZFS’s ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache). ZFS is an advanced file system known for its data integrity and scalability, but its memory requirements can sometimes be too high, especially when running on machines with limited RAM. I’ll show you how to manage this effectively to prevent ZFS from consuming too much memory, allowing you to run virtual machines (VMs) like pfSense more efficiently. ...